LOOSE IN LONDON (1953)
Article #1217 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-14-2004
Posting Date: 12-11-2004
Directed by Edward Bernds
Featuring Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bernard Gorcey

The Bowery Boys discover that Sach is an heir to the fortune of the Earl of Walsingham, so they go to England.

Well, it’s another Bowery Boys movie, and if you’ve seen enough of these, you know the score. It’s one of the better ones, though, despite the fact that we get a lot more of Huntz Hall’s mugging than we do of Leo Gorcey’s malaprops. The fantastic elements are pretty weak; there’s some talk of the ghost of an executioner, and some of the action near the end takes place in a torture chamber, but all in all it’s a pretty slight affair in this regard. It does give you a chance to hear Bowery Boy banter translated into Shakespearese, though.

THE LIVING HEAD (1963)
(a.k.a. LA CABEZA VIVIENTE)
Article #1204 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-1-2004
Posting Date: 11-28-2004
Directed by Manuel San Fernando and Chano Urueta
Featuring Mauricio Garces, Ana Luisa Peluffo, German Robles

When scientists remove artifacts and bodies from an Aztec burial tomb, they come under the sway of a curse that threatens to destroy them all.

Those Mexicans sure knew how to pile it on. Though at heart this is your basic mummy movie, we get a lot more here than just a mummy killing people. Our mummy in this case isn’t bandaged, and though he walks stiffly at times, at others he’s unexpectedly limber and agile. He’s also a talker; if he catches you, rest assured that you will be treated to a long boring speech about the nature of your sacrifice before he finally kills you. Of course, he’s not the brains of the outfit here; credit for that must go to the living head of the title. This head has amazing powers; he can glare at you, he can make his mask magically disappear, and he can have big fake spiders crawl over his face without letting it freak him out. He himself gets a little loquacious towards the end of the movie. And if this terrifying duo isn’t enough, they also have their human slave; apparently anyone who wears that flashing mood ring found in the tomb can come under the power of that head. This person is absolutely necessary; after all, with the mummy busy killing and talking the ears off his victims, we need someone to tote that head around. Unfortunately, the mummy isn’t allowed to kill the third person in the series (I can only assume that this is some sort of obscure Aztec law), and the last fifteen minutes of the movie deals largely with the difficulty of getting those pesky human slaves to do what they’re told (good help is hard to find) and trying to sort out just who is allowed to kill who; it’s at this point that the living head starts putting in his two cents. This last sequence of the movie makes for some great comedy, but it doesn’t quite make up for the fact that most of this movie is slow-moving and dull. Fans of THE BRAINIAC will recognize some of the actors, some of the music, and even some of the dates that flash by on the screen to indicate the passage of time.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)
Article #1203 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-30-2004
Posting Date: 11-27-2004
Directed by Wes Craven
Featuring Sandra Cassel, Lucy Grantham, David Hess

Two teenage girls are kidnapped by a group of sadistic rapist-murderers.

I’ll openly admit to having gone into this movie with a high degree of nervousness; after all, its reputation precedes it. Some people consider it a horror classic; others revile the movie, considering it sickening and repulsive, and with these extreme reactions, I was really wondering what I would ultimately make out of the movie.

One thing I did do out of curiosity before I watched the movie was to check out its user ratings on IMDB. Given the extreme reactions to it, I expected to find that most of the votes would place clearly at the bottom or the top of the rating scale. Instead, I found a fairly even distribution of votes throughout the whole spectrum of ratings. I certainly didn’t expect the grey area between classic and atrocity to be as heavily inhabited as it was. Finally, I sat down and watched the movie.

It’s easy to understand why the movie is disturbing; the characters of the two girls and their captors are unusually well-drawn and fleshed out, and we do get a sense with these characters that we’re seeing real people rather than one-dimensional caricatures. As a result, the violence and brutality has a truly unsettling power to it, and some of the scenes will etch themselves into your memory. If the whole movie had maintained this sense of reality, it would indeed have been a movie to be reckoned with.

However, the movie shoots itself in the foot by the introduction of the comic relief cops. Instead of projecting that same sense of reality that the central characters manage to do, they come off as pure cinematic caricature. Furthermore, the good-timey folk music that pops up on occasion is so jarringly counter to the mood that it’s disconcerting. Though I don’t necessarily think it was intended, both these elements send out a message to the viewer that he’s watching a “fun” horror movie not to be taken seriously, and this implies that the scenes of sadistic torture are just “part of the fun”. With the movie sending out these mixed messages, it’s no surprise to me that some people find the movie vile.

Initially, my reaction to this mix of scenes was one of annoyance; I really began to feel the filmmakers were just jerking me around. As the movie progressed, the damage became greater; any sense that the events in the movie were really happening started to dissipate, and by the time the final credits rolled, the movie had managed to for me what the ad campaign had told me that I’d have to do for myself; it convinced me that it really was “only a movie” and that none of it really happened. And my final reaction to the movie wasn’t one of having been deeply moved or deeply outraged; it was merely one of having been vaguely disappointed.

In the end, I just don’t know what to make of the movie. If it was supposed to be a “fun” horror movie, it went too far. If it was trying to be something more than that, it fumbled the opportunity. Having now seen it, I can understand the reason why the ratings are all over the board on IMDB; when it works, I can see why some consider it a classic, and when it doesn’t, I can see why some people hate it. I can also see how people would be able to perceive both its strengths and its flaws and leave it hanging somewhere in the middle. My own feeling is that as a whole, the movie fails to convince me that the sadistic violence of its central scenes is really artistically justified, even if it came close.

At any rate, I’m certainly not nervous about this movie anymore.

THE LION MAN (1936)
Article #1197 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 6-24-2004
Posting Date: 11-21-2004
Directed by John P. McCarthy
Featuring Kathleen Burke, Jon Hall, Ted Adams

A boy whose father was killed in an ambush by a double-dealing sheik is rescued by a woman and raised by a man who brings him up with lions. He grows up to defend others who are being victimized by the same sheik.

I was wondering for a bit while watching this as to what was giving this movie that slightly poetic feeling to it; it was then that I realized that all the Arabs were speaking in a somewhat Shakespearean “thee-thou-thy” mode. Once I realized this, though, that slight poetic feeling gave way to a sense of silliness instead, but I will admit that it lends a certain odd dignity to the proceedings. This one was based on a story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and given the title, I thought it was largely going to be a Tarzan variation with a man raised in the desert by lions (whereas Tarzan was raised in the jungle by apes), but that’s not really the case; the boy is raised by a human who associates with lions. Actually, it would be kind of nice to see someone interact with the lions, but the full grown lions never appear in the same scenes as the humans; we do see humans cuddling lion cubs on occasion. The only fantastic aspect to this one is that slight air of fantasy that comes with setting a melodrama in an exotic location, so this one remains thoroughly marginal. Overall, it’s an odd and not quite effective movie; the beginning is strong and it ends all right, but the soap opera subplot that makes up most of the middle of the story largely exists to mark time until the end of the movie. It’s mostly of interest to those who want to try out an adaptation of one of Burrough’s lesser known works.

THE LOVE OF SUNYA (1927)
Article #1084 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 3-3-2004
Posting Date: 7-31-2004
Directed by Albert Parker
Featuring Gloria Swanson, John Boles, Pauline Garon

A woman wishing to marry the man she loves discovers that her father is in debt. Her duty towards her father tempts her into considering alternative choices that would get her father out of debt. She is then visited by a mystic who offers her a chance to look into a crystal ball to see the results of her choices.

This interesting silent drama has two fantastic aspects; first of all, there is the use of the crystal balls to foresee the possible futures, and secondly there is a backstory in which we discover that the mystic was once a priest in ancient Egypt who wrongs a woman unto death, and who now lives under a curse to expiate his sin by finding the woman’s reincarnation and atoning for his sin. Outside of bringing the theme of destiny into the story at an early point, the latter subplot has very little impact on the story as a whole; it could have been omitted without really damaging the story. The basic story and the final moral are both pretty simple, and in some ways everything that happens is a fait accompli, but it’s well acted (particularly from Gloria Swanson as the torn Sunya) and has some very well-directed sequences, including a clever scene at a dinner table which focuses only on the movements of hands. It strains credibility at one point when the story heaps so much undeserved misery and degradation on one character that it almost becomes laughable, but shortly after that it features a revelation that manages to not only put this exaggeration in an understandable context, but also short circuits one of the fantastic aspects of the tale. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting movie, and it’s always entertaining to see Gloria Swanson at her best.

THE LOST JUNGLE (1934/I)
(Serial)
Article #1069 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 2-17-2004
Posting Date: 7-16-2004
Directed by David Howard and Armand Schaefer
Featuring Clyde Beatty, Cecilia Parker, Syd Saylor

A noted lion tamer crash-lands on a strange island with an unusual assortment of animals; there he runs into sailors threatening to mutiny over the possession of a hidden treasure.

This serial doesn’t appear to be well liked, but I have to admit to a fondness for any serial with a good gimmick. I loved the Houdini serial THE MASTER MYSTERY because they allowed him to use the cliffhangers as excuses to do his escape routines, and this one allows Beatty to use his animal-taming tactics. The fantastic aspects here are the island itself (it was supposedly part of a strip of land that connected Africa and Asia, thus explaining the existence of wildly divergent species such as lions, tigers and bears) and Beatty’s hypnotic powers that will cause tigers to lie down. Syd Saylor is the comic relief cowardly sidekick who threatens to become annoying (he has a scared reaction that involves a bobbing bowtie and rolling eyes that is more bizarre than funny), but fortunately he doesn’t overdo his bit and actually proves to be fairly useful on occasions. The movie also has a cast of characters that I can actually tell apart, which is pretty rare for a serial. All the animals are real with the exception of the gorilla (which is a man in a suit), and I couldn’t help but note the irony that this becomes the only animal that Clyde actually kills during the course of the serial. It’s not great, but for a Mascot serial, it’s better than average.

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD (1960)
(a.k.a. LA CAPERUCITA ROJA)
Article #1013 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-23-2003
Posting Date: 5-21-2003
Directed by Roberto Rodriguez
Featuring Maria Gracia, Manuel ‘Loco’ Valdes, Santnon

A big, bad wolf has plans of making a meal of a girl known as Little Red Riding Hood.

After steeling myself with Mexican horror movies, and then further building up strength by taking on Mexican wrestling movies, I now finally have taken the step and truly plunged into the abyss; the Mexican Kiddie Movie, brought to us by the courtesy of K. Gordon Murray. So here are ten thoughts on one of the strangest of kiddie movies, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD.

1) Whatever you can say about the various pros and cons of the movies from south of the border, one talent they certainly didn’t have was in building a good costume. The costumes for both the Skunk and the Wolf are almost unspeakably bad. They also look itchy. I hope the actors in them were well paid.

2) I learned several things from this movie. One is that the Mexicans celebrate Mardi Gras. Another is that they have maypoles at their Mardi Gras. The third is that they dance around the maypole. This in itself doesn’t strike me as strange; however, the fact that they dance ‘The Polka’ around the maypole did give me pause.

3) The voice of the skunk convinced me of one thing; there was once a fourth Chipmunk that David Seville kicked out of the group. I think he was named Stinky.

4) The reason Stinky was kicked out of the Chipmunks was because he couldn’t carry a tune. Need proof? Just listen to the skunk in this movie warbling a song to his true love, a parrot.

5) When the skunk began to sing, I felt like I was listening to the last member of the cast that I wanted to hear crooning a tune. I discovered I was wrong; the wolf also gets to sing a song.

6) Incidentally, the wolf only sings to the Grandma after tying her up, putting her in a stewpot, and stuffing a potato in her mouth. Amazingly, Grandma survives this (the singing, that is).

7) And while we’re still talking about the singing, take note that Red Riding Hood herself has a singing voice that suffers from Jim Nabors syndrome; it’s so vastly different from her speaking voice that I’m confident it added at least twenty years to her age.

8) All right, I’m still on this singing kick. Somehow, I just think it’s horribly unfair to have to listen to a singing group of lumberjacks and not hear them do Monty Python’s “I’m a Lumberjack” song.

9) The wolf, by the way, is a successful master of disguise. I attribute this not to any appreciable talent on his part, but rather to acute astigmatism on the part of the rest of the cast.

10) This movie tells a lot more than the basic Little Red Riding Hood story; it also reveals her mythic origins and gives her the previously unsuspected power to banish evil spirits from haunted caves. Either she’s an exorcist, or the moviemakers decided to throw in their deus ex machina twenty minutes before the end of the movie.

….and *SPOILER*SPOILER*SPOILER

11) Do you know how angry villagers punish a Big Bad Wolf? They burn him at the stake (and he didn’t even turn anyone into a newt) and allow a skunk to slap him around. However, if a girl in a red riding hood pleads for his pardon, they are legally obliged not only to set him free, they must find a job for him, dress him in a nice suit of clothes, and give him a rifle. The Mexican judicial system must be something else indeed.

****END OF SPOILER*********

In summary, let me say this. I don’t take drugs, and as long as I can view hallucinatory movies like this one, I’ll never need them.

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH (1948)
Article #1010 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 12-20-2003
Posting Date: 5-18-2003
Directed by Henry Koster
Featuring Tyrone Power, Anne Baxter, Cecil Kellaway

A journalist sells his talents to an aspiring politician because of his engagement to the man’s daughter. However, a leprachaun shows up and tries to match the journalist up with an Irish girl who loves him.

This odd little mixture of drama, comedy and fantasy is a little slow-moving out of the gate, but in general it works all right and is entertaining enough. The performances are very good throughout, particularly from Tyrone Power (as the journalist) and Cecil Kellaway (as the leprachaun); the latter would get nominated for a best-supporting Oscar for his performance. It’s a bit uneven; the comedic, dramatic and fantastic elements don’t quite mesh as smoothly as they could, but the movie does work up a fair amount of charm, particularly towards the end. Keep your eyes open for Lee J. Cobb, and keep your ears open for “Greensleeves”.

THE LOST WORLD (1960)
Article #983 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-23-2003
Posting Date: 4-21-2004
Directed by Irwin Allen
Featuring Claude Rains, Michael Rennie, Jill St. John

Professor Challenger organizes an expedition to a plateau which is inhabited by dinosaurs.

I’m not an Irwin Allen fan, but I do feel that he had a flair for eye candy and makes nice use of color at times. The movie is very easy to look at, and the slurpasaur scenes are certainly some of the better I’ve seen of that variety, so much so that I’d even forgive him using slurpasaurs if Willis O’Brien’s name hadn’t been hanging there in the credits to remind us of what could have been. What tries my patience is his handling of characters and actors; the movie is so overloaded with stock melodramatic characters and situations (love triangles, secret vendettas, etc.) that you look forward to the dinosaur scenes merely in the hope that it will distract us from the human characters. It’s depressing to see Claude Rains overacting in one of his rare bad performances; his dialogue is so florid and melodramatic that he would have been better off underplaying. I like Michael Rennie, but somehow I don’t quite buy him as a big-game hunter and adventurer. Other distractions include Jill St. John’s pink pants and poodle (two things she should have left at home), and somehow I find it truly annoying that the script makes Jay Novello’s character 1) a craven coward, 2) an incessant whiner, 3) a lip-smacking would-be rapist, 4) a greedy diamond hunter, and 5) a person who speaks with a foreign accent; any one of those qualities would probably guarantee his death before the final reel, and to heap them all on the same person is overdoing it more than just a little.

LIGHTNING BOLT (1966)
(a.k.a. OPERACION GOLDMAN)
Article #981 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 11-21-2003
Posting Date: 4-19-2004
Directed by Antonio Margheriti
Featuring Anthony Eisley, Wandisa Guida, Folco Lulli

When rocket launches are repeatedly sabotaged at Cape Kennedy, superspy Harry Sennet from the FSIC is called onto the case.

You know, it’s a good thing for the Italian film industry that the whole superspy/supervillain craze came about when it did; otherwise, what would they have had to churn out after the sword and sandal craze died down? (Answer: Spaghetti westerns). In short, this is another Italian Bond ripoff, with a title (LIGHTNING BOLT) designed to make you think of another Bond opus, and if that isn’t enough of a clue, consider that the ad tagline that appears on my copy of the movie reads “…strikes like a ball of thunder!” Furthermore, the Italian title itself is designed to make you think of GOLDFINGER, which is further emphasized by the fact that our main villain is a short-haired overweight man who reminds you more than a little of Gert Frobe. At the beginning of the movie, we’re informed that our hero likes to use money to accomplish his goals, because he doesn’t believe in violence; considering the number of times he beats up people in this movie, I’d have to say they really didn’t develop that theme very well. All in all, it’s business as usual for this sort of thing; bad dubbing, lots of fistfights, lots of beautiful women, a few clever moments, and a number of science-fictional gadgets and concepts (including the fact that the villain places his foes in suspended animation rather than killing them outright) are all to be found. What it lacks is the slickness (and the budget) of the Bond movies and a hero as charismatic as the ones who have played Bond.

Oddly enough, though I’m not a particular fan of the Bond movies, somehow I’m a little taken with these cheap Italian rip-offs. Go figure.